CHRISTOPHER CHERNIAK
The Riddle
of the Universe
and Its Solution
We have prepared this report to provide fuller information in connection
with the President's recent press conference on the so-called "Riddle."
We hope the report helps to dispel the ugly mood apparent throughout
the country, bordering on panic, which has most recently found expres-
sion in irresponsible demands to close the universities. Our report has
been prepared in haste; in addition, our work was tragically disrupted, as
described later.
We first review the less well known early history of the Riddle. The
earliest known case is that of C. Dizzard, a research fellow with the
Autotomy Group at M.I.U. Dizzard had previously worked for several
small firms specializing in the development of artificial intelligence soft-
ware for commercial applications. Dizzard's current project involved the
use of computers in theorem proving, on the model of the proof in the
1970s of the four-color theorem. The state of Dizzard's project is known
only from a year-old progress report; however, these are often intended
at most for external use. We shall not discuss the area of Dizzard's work
further. The reason for our reticence will be apparent shortly.
Dizzard last spoke one morning before an Easter weekend, while
waiting for a routine main computer system failure to be fixed. Col-
leagues saw Dizzard at the terminal in his office at about midnight that
day; late-night work habits are common among computer users, and
Dizzard was known to sleep in his office. On the next afternoon, a co-
worker noticed Dizzard sitting at his terminal. He spoke to Dizzard, but
Dizzard did not reply, not an unusual occurrence. On the morning after
the vacation, another colleague found Dizzard sitting with his eyes open
before his terminal, which was on. Dizzard seemed awake but did not
respond to questions. Later that day, the colleague became concerned by
Dizzard's unresponsiveness and tried to arouse him from what he
thought was a daydream or daze. When these attempts were unsuccessful,
Dizzard was taken to a hospital emergency room.
Dizzard showed symptoms of a total food-and-water fast of a week
(aggravated by marginal malnutrition caused by a vending-machine diet);
he was in critical condition from dehydration. The inference was that
Dizzard had not moved for several days, and that the cause of his immo-
bility was a coma or trance. The original conjecture was that a stroke or
tumor caused Dizzard's paralysis. However, electroencephalograms in-
dicated only deep coma. (According to Dizzard's health records, he had
been institutionalized briefly ten years ago, not an uncommon incident
in certain fields.) Dizzard died, apparently of his fast, two days later.
Autopsy was delayed by objections of next of kin, members of a breaka-
way sect of the neo Jemimakins cult. Histological examination of Diz-
zard's brain so far has revealed no damage whatever; these investigations
continue at the National Center for Disease Control.
The director of the Autotomy Group appointed one of Dizzard's
graduate students to manage his project while a decision was made about
its future. The floor of Dizzard's office was about one foot deep in papers
and books; the student was busy for a month just sorting the materials
into some general scheme. Shortly afterward, the student reported at a
staff meeting that she had begun work on Dizzard's last project and that
she had found little of particular interest. A week later she was found
sitting at the terminal in Dizzard's office in an apparent daze.
There was confusion at first, because she was thought to be making
a poor joke. She was staring straight ahead, breathing normally. She did
not respond to questions or being shaken, and showed no startle re
sponse to loud noises. After she was accidentally bumped from her chair,
she was hospitalized. The examining neurologist was unaware of Diz-
zard's case. He reported the patient was in apparently good physical
condition, except for a previously undiagnosed pineal gland abnormality.
After Autotomy Project staff answered inquiries by the student's friends,
her parents informed the attending physician of Dizzard's case. The
neurologist noted the difficulty of comparing the two cases, but sug-
gested the similarities of deep coma with no detectable brain damage; the
student's symptoms constituted no identifiable syndrome.
After further consultation, the neurologist proposed the illness
might be caused by a slow acting sleeping-sickness-like pathogen, caught
from Dizzard's belongings--perhaps hitherto unknown, like Legion
naire's Disease. Two weeks later, Dizzard's and his student's offices were
quarantined. After two months with no further cases and cultures yield-
ing only false alarms, quarantine was lifted.
When it was discovered janitors had thrown out some of Dizzard's
records, a research fellow and two more of Dizzard's students decided to
review his project files. On their third day, the students noticed that the
research fellow had fallen into an unresponsive trancelike state and did
not respond even to pinching. After the students failed to awaken the
research fellow, they called an ambulance. The new patient showed the
same symptoms as the previous case. Five days later, the city public health
board imposed a quarantine on all building areas involved in Dizzard's
project.
The following morning, all members of the Autotomy Group refused
to enter the research building. Later that day, occupants of the rest of the
Autotomy Group's floor, and then all 500 other workers in the building,
discovered the Autotomy Project's problems and left the building. The
next day, the local newspaper published a story with the headline "Com-
puter Plague." In an interview, a leading dermatologist proposed that a
virus or bacterium like computer lice had evolved that metabolized newly
developed materials associated with computers, probably silicon. Others
conjectured that the Autotomy Project's large computers might be emit-
ting some peculiar radiation. The director of the Autotomy Group was
quoted: The illnesses were a public health matter, not a concern of
cognitive scientists.
The town mayor then charged that a secret Army project involving
recombinant DNA was in progress at the building and had caused the
outbreak. Truthful denials of the mayor's claim were met with under
standable mistrust. The city council demanded immediate quarantine of
the entire ten-story building and surrounding area. The university ad-
ministration felt this would be an impediment to progress, but the local
Congressional delegation's pressure accomplished this a week later.
Since building maintenance and security personnel would no longer even
approach the area, special police were needed to stop petty vandalism by
juveniles. A Disease Control Center team began toxicological assays,
protected by biohazard suits whenever they entered the quarantine zone.
In the course of a month they found nothing, and none of them fell ill.
At the time some suggested that, because no organic disease had been
discovered in the three victims, and the two survivors showed some
physiological signs associated with deep meditation states, the cases
might be an outbreak of mass hysteria.
Meanwhile, the Autotomy Group moved into a "temporary" World
War II-era wooden building. While loss of more than ten million dollars
in computers was grave, the group recognized that the information, not
the physical artifacts that embodied it, was indispensable. They devised
a plan: biohazard-suited workers fed "hot" tapes to readers in the quar-
antine zone; the information was transmitted by telephone link from the
zone to the new Autotomy Project site and recorded again. While tran-
scription of the tapes allowed the project to survive, only the most impor-
tant materials could be so reconstructed. Dizzard's project was not in the
priority class; however, we suspect an accident occurred.
A team of programmers was playing back new tapes, checking them
on monitors, and provisionally indexing and filing their contents. A new
programmer encountered unfamiliar material and asked a passing pro
ject supervisor whether it should be discarded. The programmer later
reported the supervisor typed in comma nds to display the file on the
monitor; as the programmer and the supervisor watched the lines ad-
vance across the screen, the supervisor remarked that the material did not
look important. Prudence prevents our quoting his comments further. He
then stopped speaking in midsentence. The programmer looked up; he
found the supervisor staring ahead. The supervisor did not respond to
questions. When the programmer pushed back his chair to run, it
bumped the supervisor and he fell to the floor. He was hospitalized with
the same symptoms as the earlier cases.
The epidemiology team, and many others, now proposed that the
cause of illness in the four cases might not be a physical agent such as
a virus or toxin, but rather an abstract piece of information-which could
be stored on tape, transmitted over a telephone line, displayed on a
screen, and so forth. This supposed information now became known as
"the Riddle," and the illness as "the Riddle coma." All evidence was
consistent with the once-bizarre hypothesis that any human who encoun-
tered this information lapsed into an apparently irreversible coma. Some
also recognized that the question of exactly what this information is was
extremely delicate.
This became clear when the programmer involved in the fourth case
was interviewed. The programmer's survival suggested the Riddle must
be understood to induce coma. He reported he had read at least some
lines on the monitor at the time the supervisor was stricken. However, he
knew nothing about Dizzard's project, and he was able to recall little
about the display. A proposal that the programmer be hypnotized to
improve his recall was shelved. The programmer agreed it would be best
if he did not try to remember any more of what he had read, although
of course it would be difficult to try not to remember something. Indeed,
the programmer eventually was advised to abandon his career and learn
as little more computer science as possible. Thus the ethical issue
emerged of whether even legally responsible volunteers should be per-
mitted to see the Riddle.
The outbreak of a Riddle coma epidemic in connection with a com-
puter-assisted theorem-proving project could be explained; if someone
discovered the Riddle in his head, he should lapse into coma before he
could communicate it to anyone. The question arose of whether the
Riddle had in fact been discovered earlier by hand and then immediately
lost. A literature search would have been of limited value, so a biographi-
cal survey was undertaken of logicians, philosophers, and mathematicians
working since the rise of modern logic. It has been hampered by precau-
tions to protect the researchers from exposure to the Riddle. At present,
at least ten suspect cases have been discovered, the earliest almost 100
years ago.
Psycholinguists began a project to determine whether Riddle coma
susceptibility was species-specific to humans. "Wittgenstein," a chimpan-
zee trained in sign language who had solved first-year college logic puz
zles, was the most appropriate subject to see the Autotomy Project tapes.
The Wittgenstein Project investigators refused to cooperate, on ethical
grounds, and kidnapped and hid the chimpanzee; the FBI eventually
found him. He was shown Autotomy tapes twenty-four hours a day, with
no effect whatever. There have been similar results for dogs and pigeons.
Nor has any computer ever been damaged by the Riddle.
In all studies, it has been necessary to show the complete Autotomy
tapes. No safe strategy has been found for determining even which por-
tion of the tapes contains the Riddle. During the Wittgenstein-Autotomy
Project, a worker in an unrelated program seems to have been stricken
with Riddle coma when some Autotomy tapes were printed out acciden-
tally at a public user area of the computer facility; a month's printouts had
to be retrieved and destroyed.
Attention focused on the question of what the Riddle coma is. Since
it resembled no known disease, it was unclear whether it was really a coma
or indeed something to be avoided. Investigators simply assumed it was
a virtual lobotomy, a kind of gridlock of the information in the synapses,
completely shutting down higher brain functions. Nonetheless, it was
unlikely the coma could be the correlate of a state of meditative enlight-
enment, because it seemed too deep to be consistent with consciousness.
In addition, no known case of Riddle coma has ever shown improvement.
Neurosurgery, drugs, and electrical stimulation have had, if any, only
negative effects; these attempts have been stopped. The provisional ver-
dict is that the coma is irreversible, although a project has been funded
to seek a word to undo the "spell" of the Riddle, by exposing victims to
computer-generated symbol strings.
The central question, "What is the Riddle?" obviously has to be
approached very cautiously. The Riddle is sometimes described as "the
Godel sentence for the human Turing machine," which causes the mind
to jam; traditional doctrines of the unsayable and unthinkable are cited.
Similar ideas are familiar in folklore-for instance, the religious theme of
the power of the "Word" to mend the shattered spirit. But the Riddle
could be of great benefit to the cognitive sciences. It might yield funda-
mental information about the structure of the human mind; it may be a
Rosetta Stone for decoding the "language of thought," universal among
all humans, whatever language they speak. If the computational theory
of mind is at all correct, there is some program, some huge word, that
can be written into a machine, transforming the machine into a thinking
thing; why shouldn't there be a terrible word, the Riddle, that would
negate the first one? But all depended on the feasibility of a field of
"Riddle-ology" that would not self-destruct.
At this point, an even more disturbing fact about the Riddle began
to emerge. A topologist in Paris lapsed into a coma similar in some
respects to Dizzard's. No computer was involved in this case. The math
ematician's papers were impounded by the French, but we believe that,
although this mathematician was not familiar with Dizzard's work, she
had become interested in similar areas of artificial intelligence. About
then four members of the Institute for Machine Computation in Moscow
stopped appearing at international conferences and, it seems, personally
answering correspondence; FBI officials claimed the Soviet Union had,
through routine espionage, obtained the Autotomy tapes. The Defense
Department began exploring the concept of "Riddle warfare."
Two more cases followed, a theoretical linguist and a philosopher,
both in California but apparently working independently. Neither was
working in Dizzard's area, but both were familiar with formal methods
developed by Dizzard and published in a well-known text ten years ago.
A still more ominous case appeared, of a biochemist working on informa-
tion-theoretic models of DNA-RNA interactions. (The possibility of a
false alarm remained, as after entering coma the biochemist clucked
continuously, like a chicken.)
The Riddle coma could no longer safely be assumed an occupational
hazard of Dizzard's specialty alone; it seemed to lurk in many forms. The
Riddle and its effect seemed not just language-independent. The Riddle,
or cognates of it, might be topic-independent and virtually ubiquitous.
Boundaries for an intellectual quarantine could not be fixed confidently.
But now we are finding, in addition, that the Riddle seems an idea
whose time has come-like the many self-referential paradoxes (of the
pattern "This sentence is false") discovered in the early part of this
century. Perhaps this is reflected in the current attitude that "computer
science is the new liberal art." Once the intellectual background has
evolved, widespread discovery of the Riddle appears inevitable. This first
became clear last winter when most of the undergraduates in a large new
introductory course on automata theory lapsed into coma during a lec-
ture. (Some who did not nevertheless succumbed a few hours later;
typically, their last word was "aha.") When similar incidents followed
elsewhere, public outcry led to the president's press conference and this
report.
While the present logophobic atmosphere and cries of "Close the
universities" are unreasonable, the Riddle coma pandemic cannot be
viewed as just another example of runaway technology. The recent
"Sonic Oven" case in Minneapolis, for instance, in which a building with
a facade of parabolic shape concentrated the noise of nearby jets during
takeoff, actually killed only the few people who happened to walk through
the parabola's focus at the wrong time. But even if the Riddle coma were
a desirable state for an individual (which, we have seen, it does not seem
to be), the current pandemic has become an unprecedented public health
crisis; significant populations are unable to care for themselves. We can
only expect the portion of our research community-an essential element
of society-that is so incapacitated to grow, as the idea of the Riddle
spreads.
The principal objective of our report was at least to decrease further
coma outbreaks. Public demand for a role in setting research policy has
emphasized the dilemma we confront: how can we warn against the
Riddle, or even discuss it, without spreading its infection? The more
specific the warning, the greater the danger. The reader might acciden-
tally reach the stage at which he sees "If p then q" and p, and so cannot
stop himself from concluding q, where q is the Riddle. Identifying the
hazardous areas would be like the children's joke "I'll give you a dollar
if you're not thinking of pink rats ten seconds from now."
A question of ethics as well as of policy remains; is the devastating
risk of the Riddle outweighed by the benefits of continued research in an
ill-defined but crucial set of fields? In particular, the authors of this report
have been unable to resolve the issue of whether the possible benefit of
any report itself can outweigh its danger to the reader. Indeed, during
preparation of our final draft one of us tragically succumbed.